Well, Jim convinced me to bring in Portal on my laptop today, and during the party I hooked it up to our projector and spent about an hour running a demo of the first few levels. Had everyone laughing at GLaDOS’s silly comments, and ooo-ing over the cool physics tricks. And a couple people said at the end that they wanted to go and buy it, “for the kids.”

The conference itself has been really cool so far, especially if you happen to be a hardcore programming geek like me.   Even without that, it’s a really nice venue.  They reserved a room for me at the Mariott hotel in San Jose, California, which is where the convention is taking place, so good accomodations, good food and a helpful hotel staff.

There have been some really good sessions talking about things you can do with Delphi programming, and a few by the product team, talking about the future of Delphi.  Also, this afternoon I had lunch with Nick Hodges, the Great High Muckety-Muck R&D Manager at Embarcadero, the company that makes Delphi.  He was sitting alone at the hall where lunch was being served (I got in right at the start–no surprise to anyone who knows me and my turbocharged metabolism) and I sat down and we started to chat.  He turned out to be very friendly and easy to talk to, and he recognized my name right away because I’m active on the Delphi forums and on Stack Overflow, a sort of specialized social networking site for asking programming questions.  A handful of other top guys from the Delphi team showed up while we were eating, and we talked about various things.  I already sorta knew this, but it was still cool to personally find out that these guys are real people, and decent, friendly people at that, and not just “suits” like TV would have you expect high-ranking corporate guys to be.

Some of the people at Pascal Game Development asked me to record my session, so I did.  I’ll take a look at it tomorrow and get it cleaned up when I’ve got the time.  I should have it all ready and be able to post it up on YouTube or something, probably by the  end of the month.

Anyway, it’s late and I’m tired, so I’m heading off to bed.  I’ll get back to work on TURBU next week, once the conference is over.  Hopefully with a bit more manpower coming soon.